We're the best

Resh

In addition to helping finalize or at least push to concept some of our expansion ideas (using the framework we built in the fall term), I helped start consideration of new moves for our art style in an attempt to help us find our artistic direction. Also, I had some emergency medical issues arise over the weekend, meaning I didn’t really get much done during Week 1 proper, as I’d set aside that time for senior project work.

Breakdown:

Map Redesign/Toolkit Work – 5 hours

Meetings – 4 hours

Total: 9 hours

Positives: I am technically not dead! (Or undead.)

Negatives: I got sick, so compared to most weeks I pretty much got nothing done.

So, today I can sum up what’s been done over the past few weeks months.

Start to finish, I had my hands in a lot of the processes, so I helped with map design, character design, helped set up the actual map in Unity, concepting, blah blah blah. I wrote other PPJ’s for that stuff. Instead, I’m going to reflect a little on how it all feels like it worked out:

In short, it worked out pretty well. Things felt a little slow at first, and they were. We dawdled on character designs for too long, and I let that happen despite my job being keeping us on task. We fell behind in some spots, but got almost completely back on track, and I feel like I did a good job at making sure we pointed in the right direction to move forward even if we weren’t where we wanted to be by the end of things.

Lighting was settled for good, I managed to figure out why our colliders kept breaking (and they should finally be fixed “for good”. We started concept work on a new set of map tiles, basically building a system so we can make maps quickly and efficiently.

We did some major lighting tests, trying to anchor our player character into the game better than it already was, as there have apparently been some concerns about how well our character will mesh with the environment. I’ve personally spent the week trying to get our lights functioning in a way that actually has them working, and not conflicting with each other so hard that we lose performance.

Additionally, we started work on our end of term presentation, going over the basics of how we want to present, and how we want to lay out various concepts.

Also, the programming team learned the hard way that if they move the camera, all of our 2D colliders will completely break, so I got to spend a night fixing them! (Sarcastic yay!)

Breakdown:

Lighting Experimentation and optimization – 8 hours

Fixing Colliders – 4 hours

Presentation Design – 3 hours

Meetings – 4 hours

Total: 19 hours

Positives: As far as we know internally, we’re on track for the deadlines we set for ourselves.

Negatives: There’s no way things will keep going this smoothly. Additionally, apparently there’s some discontent within the group, but we’ll be giving everyone a chance to voice their concerns within the next day or so.

We playtested! We playtested so much and so hard, I dare say no one will ever playtest as hard as we did. Well, I can say that, doesn’t mean it’s true but I can at least say it. We got a lot of great data. Additionally, we have a functional walk cycle in-game, and the map is now properly proportioned, and also textured!

Well, Halloween happened, so in addition to creepy crawlies, I started inputting things like the walk cycle into our game, which we’re going to be using for independent testing to see if the scale needs to be changed. Additionally, I helped starting to help prep for a playtesting session on Tuesday.

So! A lot happened this week and by some miracle we’re once more on track with what we initially planned!

Breakdown:
Meetings with our adviser, as well as meetings with EGS and general purpose group meetings all happened. Specifically, we settled on some sizing things, some map things, and some color things. Mechanics were also reworked to better fit the style of game we want to make. – 7 hours total

We had a good week, in my opinion. Things ran smoothly and we hit all the things we intended to hit. It was a little choppy at some parts but we’re in no worse shape than we thought we’d be in around this time, so it all worked out.

Negative:

We should have had some of these things settled weeks ago, but it couldn’t be helped seeing as other groups got a significant head start on us.